Advantageously, a medical diagnosis/treatment table has one or more apertures formed in the table, for example in a central region of the table, to allow for cable access or to comfortably accommodate the patient's face when facing downwards, or at side edges of the table to allow for close positioning of additional medical equipment. Also, it may be important to have the facility of anchor points or supports at various places on the table, so that appropriate fixing and positioning to the table base can be provided.
There are a various types of medical treatment tables presently available, for example one type incorporating a carbon fibre body.
However, because of the standard form of construction of a carbon fibre body, any aperture in a carbon fibre body introduces a weakening of the overall structure, and therefore the entire body has to be very carefully designed and precisely manufactured to compensate for any such consequential weakening. Thus, a carbon fibre table must be specifically and individually designed in advance for each particular type of medical analysis or treatment equipment to be used. Modifications to carbon fibre composites are difficult to make and require specialist equipment. Hence adapting the tables to a variety of machines is impractical.
Furthermore, carbon fibre tables cannot readily be used with MRI equipment because the inherent electrical conductivity of the material will tend to have detrimental effects resulting from the enormously large magnet fields generated in MRI equipment during use, causing heating and noise and artifacts on the MRI images. Also, this type of table is not recyclable.
Current MRI tables are made of moulded thermoplastics material. They are curved for comfort as well as for strength, but this means that, in diagnostic procedures requiring accurate positioning, it is not possible to provide accurate matching with images from other machines which have either flat or differently-curved table tops.
Diagnostic table tops are suitable for radiation treatment as well as X-ray diagnostics, but not for MRI diagnostic scans. Thus, the use of various conventional diagnostic equipment for more accurate treatment is limited.